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Continue reading →: A Black Romance Author TimelineI want to start by saying that this will not be a static post. I’ve been piecing together the history of Black authors in romance for something close to five years and I feel like I’m constantly turning up something new. My goal with this post is to get the…
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Continue reading →: Collecting Romance: A Very Fortunate FindEvery collector of anything has that short list of items in the back of their mind that they’d instantly pay any price for if they find it in the right circumstances. Sometimes it’s something well known and rare like a missile-firing Boba Fett or a Billy Ripken error card, and…
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Continue reading →: Rubie Saunders (1929 – 2001)One of the great things about writing these blog posts as an independent scholar is the ability to say “I don’t know”. I don’t know much about Rubie Saunders. There is precious little written about her, but she certainly left a mark. A 1950 graduate of Hunter College, she joined…
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Continue reading →: Romance Fiction Has a History.Over the past 50 years, romance has gotten relatively little attention from academia, and much of it mirrored the derisive approach of mainstream media towards the genre. This has started to change on both counts, with the development and growth of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance…
Hello,
I’m Steve.
For more than a century, romance fiction has served as a mirror for societal ideas of gender, class, and race. I explore the stories behind the books to shed light on how authors, publishers, and editors shaped the genre.
Romance Fiction Has a History 